


the anger that language shelters

by QuickYoke



Series: to the devil in his own way [4]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types, Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-14
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-31 13:59:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10900788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickYoke/pseuds/QuickYoke
Summary: Emily could no longer imagine a Dunwall without her.





	the anger that language shelters

 

> _“But you know none of us is pure. You know the anger that language shelters, that love obeys.”_
> 
> _-Anne Carson, the Anthropology of Water_
> 
>  

* * *

* * *

 I. **WRATH**

Every morning aboard the ship Evie covered her face with creams and powders. Her scars vanished beneath layers of concealer until all that remained was a pale slivered dart through her eyebrow. While tucking in her shirt to her high-waisted slacks Emily would let her eye linger as Evie leaned forward against the porcelain basin to apply her mask of powders, her wine-dark lipstick. Spots of old blood marred Evie’s velvet-lined jacket and the silk sash wrapping her hips.

Evie caught her gaze in the mirror. “Trying to commit me to memory? I don’t imagine I’ll be leaving _that_ soon.”

With a snap Emily strung the trouser suspenders over her shoulders. Evie’s reminder of the transience of their time together stung more. “You need new clothes. Yours are starting to look a little worse for wear.”

Twisting a jar shut between her hands, Evie set it aside. Though her tone remained flat and uninflected, she shot Emily a teasing, torrid look in the mirror. “Perhaps you’d like to help me get rid of them.”

Emily was all too happy to comply.

By the time they stepped, blinking, abovedeck, Meagan was already waiting for them by the skiff. Ash burned at her fingertips and several more cigarette butts had been stamped out at her feet. She took a long last drag at the remaining cigarette before throwing it down and grinding it beneath her heel. The worn leather scuffed against the rough wooden decking. “Are you two ready yet?”

Clearing her throat, Evie patted a stray lock of hair back into place. “We were just going over the plan of attack once more before setting out.” When Meagan met her excuse with a dull, unimpressed stare, Evie bristled. “I’ve always been a firm proponent of being well-prepared for an assault.”

Meagan arched an eyebrow at the visible bruising at Emily’s neck, only mostly hidden by the scarf there. She snorted when Emily hastily pulled the scarf up to cover the lower half of her face. “From the looks of it, the assault has already happened -- but that’s none of my business.” She clambered aboard the skiff, surprisingly dextrous for someone missing half an arm. “Come on. I’ll brief you on the way over. Unless you’re so prepared you don’t need to hear what I learned about the Dust District?”

Under her breath Evie muttered something about time spent in reconnaissance never being wasted – it sounded like an old saying of her father’s – and it was the first time Emily had seen someone over the age of forty actually blush. As the skiff was cranked down into the water and bobbed along the waves, slinging specks of salt-harsh water against their upturned collars, Emily only listened with half an ear, too busy admiring the glimmer of droplets that cottoned onto Evie’s dark hair, the sharp attentiveness with which she minded Meagan’s report. A knife-slash cut a small hole in Evie’s jacket – evidence of some battle or another earlier that week. Emily reached out to tug a loose thread free, and Evie shot her a warning look when Meagan noticed.

In Batista even during clear skies the Sirhrocco Currents whistled through the far-off mines. The whine could be heard over the parapets of the hive-like windbreakers that affixed themselves to the sides of buildings, channelling faint trails of air that shimmered in the harsh noonday sun. Emily and Evie snuck along the walls and pipes above the barricaded streets. Windmills towered and creaked, churning in time with the constant whine. Every quarter hour the winds whipped to a wail, billowing up a plume of dust that stripped the paint from dilapidated buildings and blotted out the sun. Siding with neither Howlers nor Overseers, sneaking utterly unseen through the storms, they left bodies in their wake, both of their sights unhindered by the dust-flecked haze.

After the dust storms would pass and their quarry lay strewn across the cobblestones, Evie would crouch in the shade of an abandoned third floor balcony, hiding herself in the doorway and hastening to clean herself up. She nursed her left knee when she thought Emily wasn’t looking. With meticulous care she would wipe down her gauntlet and at the splatter of fresh blood against her cheek, and with every battle her mask would be peeled away – layer by husked layer – until only a flayed version of herself remained.

Emily pretended not to notice. She used to do the same back at Dunwall: sneaking into the tower during the witching hour after a long night of jumping rooftops, palms scraped bloodied and raw. The thrill of it. The same thrill she saw on Evie’s face when she slit the throat of a man caught in a dust storm. Moving to their next victim in swiftness, in silence, in hunger -- how easy it was to slacken the reins, to be herself with Evie at her side, revelling in their wild wrathful solitude. Just the two of them set against an empire to protect a legacy and reclaim a throne.   

“What was your first kill?”

Emily stifled a noise behind her hand, and Evie bit at her wrist in a sharp rebuke. Outside the wind howled at the abandoned building, drumming at the boarded windows, leaking dust through the gap beneath the door. Emily had her back pressed against a crumbling wall, her fitted trousers peeled down to her knees, three of Evie’s fingers thrust into her up to the knuckles. The front of Evie’s jacket and off-white trousers were painted in a wide apron of red, and her gore-smeared gauntlet lay discarded beside Emily’s blade on the ground not far away. On the opposite side of the room they had piled up the bodies in stacks, two high a-piece, dragging them in off the streets out of sight, Overseers and Howlers alike.

Evie swiped her thumb across Emily’s clit. “How did it happen? Who was it? Did you even know their name?”

“Ramsay. It was Ramsay.” Emily gasped. She clawed at Evie’s shoulder, grappling with the hood there and grasping the fabric tight. “The Guard Officer who betrayed me. I waited for him atop the balcony overlooking the stairs. Dropped down. Took him by surprise. He never knew it was me.”

Evie curled her fingers and was rewarded with a jerk of Emily’s hips. With her free hand she pushed Emily’s chin up roughly, revealing her throat above the gold-stitched scarf that normally covered her face. “I was twenty-one, drunk, and grief-stricken. Three thugs cornered me in an alley after my father’s funeral and I put them down like dogs.” She scraped the column of Emily’s throat with the nail of her thumb. “I was almost sick with how much I liked it.”

Emily clenched her teeth until the muscles of her jaw smarted, groaning something raw and unintelligible when Evie bit her neck, branding her in royal purples and blues, bruises and teeth-marks. She squeezed her eyes shut and saw her father’s sword driving into Ramsay’s traitorous neck. Wrenching it free in a black and wounding spray. Hot blood welling up in his mouth, dying her clothes a darker shade. Dropping him to the ground to watch him welter. Evie kissed her and she came apart in Evie’s hands with the hard iron taste of blood flecking the air, going weak and shaking.

Afterwards while Emily tucked the ends of her shirt into her trousers for the third time that day, she nodded towards Evie, who was cleaning her gauntlet with a fastidious stare. “We really do need to get you new clothes, you know.”

“You may be right,” Evie sighed. Setting aside her gauntlet onto a table bearing old books and a mound of dust, Evie shucked her ruined jacket with a grimace of distaste, flinging it atop one of the corpses. It fell with a clatter of belt buckles and a flutter of silk. Slowly Evie tugged her gauntlet over the width of her hand. Her waistcoat and pale undershirt only bore a few daubs of blood that had seeped through the jacket, yet she fiddled with the brownish spots at her cuff before tucking it beneath the gauntlet.

Her white silk sash draped over one of the Overseers like a shroud. She glanced back at it as Emily started making an exit for the door. Once – twice.

Emily paused at the threshold when Evie did not immediately follow. “What’s wrong?”

“That was the first thing I ever bought in India,” Evie said, her voice wistful. She tongued thoughtfully at the inside of her cheek as she contemplated the soiled and discarded sash, her gaze long as an imperial mile.

Emily reached for the heart, but stopped. Her fingers traced the ridge of a severed artery here, the prick of a bonecharm there, as though willing to the surface all the knowledge it could impart yet never fully grasping it. Hand lingering at the underside of her coat, she said, “You should keep it.”

“No.” Evie turned away, shaking herself as though from a stupor. “I should leave it behind.”

They spoke no more of it. Back on the Dreadful Wale Emily tried loaning Evie something from her own wardrobe, but Emily’s slender frame did not lend itself well to the task. “You’re surprisingly stocky,” Emily told her, lounging lazily at her desk, pen poised over a half-written page in her diary. She hid a grin when Evie spluttered as though gravely insulted.

“Not all of us can be lanky as a string bean!” Evie accused. Emily’s dark-wash trousers hung long and slack around her feet, tight around her thighs. Irritably, she tugged on Emily’s spare coat, trying and failing to fasten it around her waist. She only desisted when the fabric gave a threatening creak around her shoulders.

Scratching at the diary with the nib of her pen, Emily teased, “Somehow this isn’t how I imagined you’d be tearing off my clothes this evening.”

Evie flung the jacket at her. It muffled Emily’s snort of laughter.

 

* * *

* * *

II.  **SELF-REALISATION**

Stilton Manor squatted along the very edge of the Dust District. Low and angular, its massive front doors gleamed with cold hard iron, impenetrable as the ocean’s depths. Emily thumbed the hilt of her blade as she entered. Beside her, Evie swept the entrance for any sign of life. None appeared. A breeze carried a slip of old newspaper across the square leading up to the mansion’s face, a wall gloomy and austere yet hinting at its grand upbringings.

Dressed now in the new outfit Meagan had procured for her from the markets Evie appeared sleek and predatory, an old raven with silvered wingtips. Her only requirement had been a hood, which draped across her shoulders. At a moment’s notice she could sweep it over her head and all but vanish from sight, a skill Emily could not muster without using the Outsider’s peculiar gifts. In one hand she clutched a cane that when drawn revealed a blade sharp enough to slice boiled leather as though it were velvet. Evie hefted it with a rare kind of familiarity, as though grasping the hand of an old friend. Here among the ruins of this place Evie appeared more at home than anywhere else in Karnaca – vibrancy did not suit her the same as dwellings haunted by ages past.

Dust congregated in the corners of the manor proper, sloping the joints of the house from wall to ground. Floorboards creaked underfoot. Everything was tinged a pale, wan grey, brittle to the touch and scent as bone. Beneath her gold-stitched scarf, Emily scrunched up her nose as they passed a room that thrummed with bloodfly hives. She touched her belt subconsciously for incendiary darts, counting only three when – peering through the cracks in stacked furniture– she would require at least four. Together they crept through Stilton Manor, blades drawn, nerves tense, speaking very little despite the absence of any visible threat. Finding Aramis was almost a relief – here at least some sign of movement in a place stagnating in its own rot.

In a room scattered with dust and detritus, Aramis Stilton plonked away at a thrice-tiered piano. Every strike of his trembling fingers against the keys sent out a ripple of notes – flat and sharp and every wavering inconsistency in between. He addressed them as though they were members of his staff, waving his hand and dismissing them with babble about Luca and the old Duke.

Standing just beside him, Evie rested both hands over the crows-skull ornament of her cane. “How long did you say he’s been locked up here? I’d wager he’s gone mad.” She knuckled at the side of her own head with a frown as he attempted to transcribe notes in thin air with an inkless pen. “Quite mad.”

“Not as long as that,” Emily muttered, sheathing her own weapon with reluctance. The hairs on the back of her arm stood straight on end. She shrugged against the feeling and scratched at the back of her hand. “Something’s off. This place – it doesn’t feel right.”

“How perceptive, Your Majesty.”

Everything shifted a step to the left, going flat and metallic, skipping over white noise like a needle over grooves of pressed plastic. Whirling around, Emily staggered back a step when she found the Outsider looming just behind her, close enough to touch. Motes of dust were captured mid-glimmer between them, the whole world frozen in colourless amber.

“Delilah has marred this place. Time slips through the cracks – time and other things.” He stood too still. His mouth moved, disjointed from the rest of his face, so that his words circled and recircled in a whirl. “You must have felt it by now.”

Watching him with a guarded expression, Emily had to remind herself not to unfold her blade, bare steel against a god of real power and substance, though her hand twitched towards the hilt regardless. His eyes – fathomless eyes – noticed everything. “I feel –“ Emily began, casting about for the words to describe the sensation that welled up in her chest. Like slamming her fist against sheets of unyielding metal. Like fingers scrabbling at warped glass; all sight and no touch. “—cut off. Severed.”

“And so you are. Cut off from _me_.” He stepped closer, and Emily steeled herself against his presence. “If you want to heal the cracks, you’re going to need to turn to sand. The both of you.” He opened his arms towards both her and Evie as though he were an acting officiant beneath a garlanded bower. “Here she is in the flesh: your shipwreck lover. She clings to the flotsam that drifts, untethered, between worlds. Where she goes, not even I know – but that’s what makes it so exciting.”

Evie’s expression was frozen in intense concentration; she had gone grey and rigid mid-turn, one heel lifted from the ground, blade peeking out from beneath her left wrist to strike the life from their supernatural eavesdropper. Suddenly propped atop the piano like a singing girl, the Outsider tapped a few lazy notes against the white keys beneath him, producing an eerie discordant silence. “Anchoring her to you won’t be easy – she’s already slipping between the cracks exposed here -- but what better partner to accompany you through the past than the woman lost in space and time? The irony really is too sweet to resist.”

“But you could do it?” Emily interrupted before he could continue on one of his rambling monologues. “You could send her back to her own world?”

“I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.” He vanished in a whorl of sulphurous smoke and reappeared beside Evie, fingertips poised beneath her chin as though tilting her face upwards to admire the fleet-footed lethality there. Emily took an abortive step forward, reaching out to push him away before stopping, hand slowly lowering to her side. He grinned, and his teeth were stained black as his eyes, glittering like the hard carapace of scarabs’s wings. “Are you selfless enough to let her go?”

The mark on the back of her hand seared, magnesium bright. Fuming, fists clenched, Emily was silent.

The Outsider’s laugh echoed, chiming like a knell, like the gong of her mother’s grandfather clock striking midnight in Dunwall Tower. “That’s what I thought.” Suddenly he appeared before her, far too close, and his voice tread through benthic depths. “It’s something you have in common with your mother – a weak heel for roguish assassin types – but I’m afraid that’s where the similarities end.”

With a flick of his fingers, he conjured a timepiece from the thinning air, a contraption of heart-shaped glass that threatened the cut the soft skin of Emily’s hand when she grabbed hold of it. Shielded only by the strip of cloth wound over her palm, she ran her thumb down its smooth face. When she turned her wrist up, a fan of mirrored blades preened open, but rather than show her reflection they revealed a rose and gold-dusted vision of the world beyond.

“You can bring her along, but there’s a catch.” The Outsider took her free hand despite her kneejerk reaction to snatch it away. When she tried, he pressed her fingers open, his touch cold and intractable as marble even as he unravelled from sight. “There’ll be no room for knives here. You’ll have to hold your heart in your hand or risk leaving it behind.”

Colour bloomed in his absence, spreading like the stain of broad bright ink across a page. Emily gripped the timepiece tight and her palm bled. Gone -- Aramis Stilton and the ruined piano room, and in his place a room lavishly immaculate. Alone in a world of light and colour, Emily looked around, calling out, “Evie? Evie!”

Muffled voices beyond a door, but when she rushed over to peer through the keyhole Emily found only a few guards trading idle gossip on the other side. Breaths shortening, she withdrew. Her hand dripped red around the glass-fired heart. With a squeeze everything slowed and flickered, cold and colourless, and she was once more faced with the dilapidated piano room. The cane lay discarded on the floor. There Evie had collapsed to her hands and knees, a flickering silhouette that gasped and clutched at its head in pain, fading in and out.

Emily rushed forward, hand hovering over Evie’s shoulder as Evie shimmered out of view -- wearing different clothes, a different hairstyle, a more youthful freckled face -- before reverting back. Scrambling for the heart in her pocket, Emily squeezed the timepiece. Again the world was awash with colour and noise, but Evie was nowhere to be found. Cursing under her breath, Emily used the timepiece. In the present, Evie’s form still flickered like pale fire, struggling to hold itself in one piece, in one place, in one time.

The heart beat in Emily’s hands, a slow steady rhythm. Tucking it away, Emily knelt down at Evie’s side and grasped her shoulder. At once Evie grew solid under her touch and gasped for air. Sweat dripped from the tip of her nose. Hoisting her up by the arms, Emily helped Evie to her feet.

 “This,” Evie knuckled at her temple, gritting her teeth beyond the high screech of pain splitting her skull, “is bloody uncomfortable. Please tell me we can leave soon.”

Timepiece in one hand, Evie in the other, Emily set her jaw. “We’ll get through as quickly as we can. Just don’t let go.”

“Trust me –“ Evie laced their fingers together, “—I’m not going anywhere.”

Aramis Stilton could be saved, Meagan’s arm could never have been chopped off, but in the end Emily could not emerge from Stilton Manor unblooded and unsated, nursing wrath with wounds, Evie limping along at her side.

 

* * *

* * *

 

**III. LOSS**

Lying atop the rafters, she threw a knife-long shadow through the pale skeins of light reflected upon the white-washed ceiling. Below, the Duke’s private bath rippled large as a pool, the room completely empty but for the three red-coated guards piled in the far corner, bleeding out atop the tiles, their eyes glassy, their mouths screwed up in snarls of rictus pain moments before their deaths. Emily was supposed to be keeping watch on the Duke’s body double while Evie hunted down Luca himself, but she bent only half an ear to the shuffle of Armando’s boots in the office a floor above. In one hand she twirled her sword with an idle flourish. In the other she cradled the heart to her chest.  

“You’ll have to share with Delilah for a bit,” Emily murmured to it. She brushed her thumb across the glass facing that revealed the heart’s many internal cogs, which whirred at her touch. One of her legs swung lazily over the side of the rafters – toe-tilted, heel-spun. “If I could think of another way, I would. I’ll try to get this over with as soon as possible, mother.”

She squeezed the heart, but before it could whisper to her a voice spoke below. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

Craning her head, Emily peered down to find Evie standing beside the running bath. Coils of steam from the basin tendrilled around her ankles, and over her shoulders was draped an unconscious Luca Abele. Emily tucked the heart away and leapt to the floor, landing in a crouch. Gaze dark and steely and fixed on the Duke, she gripped her sword. “You didn’t kill him.”

Evie gave her a queer look. “No. I didn’t.” She turned away and left the room, and Emily followed her out. Upon the massive circular bed in the centre of the Duke’s office Evie dropped his body. A feathered dart stuck from his back and he snored into the rumpled ochre-yellow sheets. Evie stood over him with a contemplative frown. “I cannot kill him. It didn’t feel right. This isn’t my decision to make. I will not preclude justice that is rightly yours to serve.”

Emily hefted the weight of her sword and Evie watched her with a keen expression. Some foul place deep in her stomach bubbled and crooned to wash the floor with his remains and pull Evie down atop the bed. Jaw firm, Emily folded her sword away and said, “Leave him for Armando. I’m sure he and Doctor Hypatia will want to mete vengeance in their own way.”

Was that disappointment on Evie’s face? Grudging admiration? Emily could not tell. Regardless Evie nodded and the two of them left Luca Abele at the mercy of his body double. Downstairs they snuck past a clockwork soldier and into a pantry, where Emily choked the life from the standing guard, holding her breath until he stopped struggling beneath her while Evie dragged a body behind a rack of dusty wine bottles. A streak of blood striped the floorboards and the asymmetrical line of Emily’s coat dripped red.

Through the secret passage, inspecting the long table of Luca Abele’s secret governance meetings, the bottles of half-drunk sloe, the many charts and newspaper clippings – **BLOODFLY SITUATION WORSENS** – then on to the vault door. Its many gears and levers tumbled at the push of a button. Ten men could not lift it, but mounted on its hinges the door opened at the press of Emily’s finger. A simple rewire tool converted the clockwork soldier guarding Delilah’s effigy, which hunched amidst a chamber of gold.

A dark corrosive liquid rained from the effigy’s ribcage, hissing and eating away at the steel-plated flooring at its base. The clockwork soldier’s heavy footsteps clunked around the perimeter, and Evie stood to the side, feigning occupation with the stacks of reserves held in their niches along the walls; Emily could feel her eyes reflected in the gold bars. Folding her blade, Emily pulled out the heart and held it forward. As Jessamine materialised before her, a smoke-blue shade of her former self, Emily’s own heart pounded in her chest, an overwhelming bruit, loud as the clamour of soldiers storming a fortress tower.

Jessamine’s face twisted and trailed in misty stems, her clothes very dark and her eyes very pale – far more pale than Emily remembered. When she spoke her voice whispered soft and mournful, like distant weeping heard through palace walls. “Release me from this dead vessel, and trap Delilah’s spirit.”

Emily’s hand clenched around the heart; it did not leap at her touch but went cold and unfeeling. “I won’t do it.” She choked, her expression stricken, pulling the heart close to her chest as though that, too, would draw her mother closer. “You were all I ever wanted.”

“Let me go. I’ve seen too much of this world.” Jessamine’s spirit went from sorrow to rebuke in an instant. “There is blood on your hands.”

Jessamine faded and flickered, growing wispy and solid with every breath. Emily stretched out her hand, straining for one last moment of contact between them, imploring, justifying – indignant, “I did this for you! To protect your legacy!”

“My daughter,” Jessamine reached out, but before their fingers could touch her limbs began to crumble into oblivion, “you are becoming everything I fought against. I love you, but let me go.”

The heart pried itself in Emily’s hand, drawing forward, and it was all she could do to keep hold of it, grab it by both hands and resist the wicked undertow. Delilah’s effigy opened its wings and light poured out, luring the heart in a harpoon’s grasp. Blinding, all-consuming, it dyed the heart cold and ink-dipped, seething in her hands, clawing against her skin. When the light faded, Emily’s eyes burned lilac-white and the heart beat only faintly, not whispering but grating and strident with Delilah’s voice. With a creak the effigy curled upon itself again, empty.

Sword in hand, raising her arm high overhead, Emily hacked at the effigy. The wings of papery leather parted beneath her sword like dry leaves. The blade snagged in the ribcage, an eruption of marrows and wildflowers, a sprouting of petals liquid-black. Planting her foot at the statue’s base, she wrenched her blade free only to slash at the effigy once more. In a clatter of bone the idol crashed to the floor and Emily fell upon it, chopping at its painted head that wept tears of bloody tar, glued together with locks of Delilah’s dead hair. The wrath sang a tongueless thunder in her teeth; she was bereft of words, the loss welling up in her chest from a place wild, primeval, and prelexical.

She didn’t realise she was crying until Evie grabbed her by the arm and hauled her away from her savage iconoclasm. Splinters of bone and timber flecked her hands raw, and the last thing Emily saw before being dragged from the vault was the wreckage of skeletal fragments shattered across the floor, Delilah’s mangled face sliced into a desecrated grin.

Back on the skiff Meagan and Evie were thick in discussion, running through the night’s events. Silent, Emily cradled the heart in her hands, elbows planted on her knees. She stared at Evie rather than the blackened heart, unable to bring herself to look at it for longer than a moment. The skiff stuttered over the harbour’s waves, and the salt spray clung like starlight to the fabric of Evie’s coat. When Evie ran a hand over her hair, dark strands slicked to her brow. Evie glanced over at her – a brief stolen slant of her blue eyes -- Emily squeezed the heart. Delilah’s voice snapped out like cold fire, and blackness oozed beneath Emily’s fingernails.

 _“She’s convinced herself she’s quite enamoured with you. It’s disgusting, really – whatever you commanded, she would obey.”_ Delilah crooned, mocking. _“Will you order her to kill me rather than strike me down yourself? Will you trap her in a world where she doesn’t belong? Your lapdog, your bloodhound, leashed to the fallen Empress of the Isles. All your life you’ll wonder: is this what she really wanted? Should you have let her go?”_

Hands shaking, Emily stuffed the heart out of sight and did not seek its counsel again.

 

* * *

* * *

 IV. **PITY**

In Dunwall Emily sought out every witch she could find. Three at a time she killed them, filling their lungs with black smoke, clawing her way towards the next in the form of a wraith, shadow given flesh. Evie followed along the rooftops, firing crossbow bolts and throwing knives through the skulls of summoned hounds that howled in chthonic pain. High overhead the Tower loomed like a blood-blackened bone against the storm-tossed sky. Thorny vines gripped its base, creeping along broken window panes. Dunwall had always been a grey and gloomy kind of place courtesy of its location, but now its eaves dripped with constant rain, gargoyles clutching the tops of pillars and spewing their watery fires, lightning lancing overhead.

Emily paused at the gazebo aside the great gates. Her rain-slicked hair stuck to her brow, revealing the narrow scar along her temple. She had to fight the urge to grip the heart when staring down at the bronze-stamped plaque bearing her mother’s name. Instead Emily swallowed past an obstruction in her throat. Her fist seethed with energy from the void as she looked across the wind-swept ocean beyond – the sloping cliffs, the wave-battered rocks, the sea a pock-marked plateau of steel and bronze; she had not seen such long rains since her time at the Hounds Pit Pub. Spilt-ale floors and the acrid film of whale oil so unlike her plush quarters at the pleasurehouse. Brothels were no place for a child of ten. Did Corvo still keep her drawings from the Golden Cat pinned up in his room like he did at the pub? She used to scrawl whorls of black for the Pendleton’s eyes; they would stand over her, darkly clad and glaring like the void.

A touch on Emily’s shoulder, and she started. Evie glanced up at her with an inscrutable expression on her face; she had laid a lonely flower at Jessamine’s memorial plaque. Emily blinked at it, then shrugged Evie’s hand away. “Let’s go,” she said, voice gruff beneath her scarf.

Evie did not tug at her sleeve, though she did murmur beneath her hood, “I overheard two of the witches discussing a ceremony Delilah has been preparing in the chapel.”

Pausing, Emily nodded. Sneaking into the chapel would mean avoiding much of the fight. She dropped down onto the witch guarding the main gates with a vengeance. When she peered into a cracked window to wipe blood from high on her cheek, a mask gazed back, veiled and black-eyed, the kind of eyes she would have drawn as a child. Tearing her gaze away, Emily stalked into the Tower.

The chapel had once been a place of solemn worship tended by its sable-garbed overseers. Now it crawled with foul magicks, trimmed with wreaths of hemlock, studded with paterae carved from skullcaps. Emily brushed aside an adornment of bonecharms and mummified human fingers; they clattered at her shoulders and she curled her lip when they touched her. Upon a table were scattered loose pages and manuscripts and sacks of mounded spices, brilliant chilli reds and saffron yellows. Emily pawed through the arcane sketches for any hint of what Delilah planned here.

“That’s it,” Evie breathed behind her. “Delilah had it all along.”

Puzzled, Emily followed Evie’s gaze to the remains of the lectern. The rich wood had been scorched and hewn with softly glowing runes, strung with dried poisonous herbs – nightshade and snakeroot and white-throated oleander. There nestled among discarded sketches in the flickering candle light, the Templar skull gleamed like green button glass, liquid-bright and opaque. The sockets held pinpricks of fire, a gaze of distant stars.

Holding Delilah’s notes in her hand, Emily watched Evie approach the skull, her walk hesitant. The breath caught in Emily’s chest when Evie reached out to touch it and the skull flared with sudden light even at the nearness of her.

“Don’t -!” Emily bit back the plea before it could escape. Evie’s hand hovered over the skull before lowering to her side once more, and only then could Emily breathe, air rasping through her lungs. She held out Delilah’s notes. “We don’t know where or when it could send you. Delilah has tampered with it, bent its magic to her own whims.”

Evie took the pages and flipped through them, scanning their contents with a furrow in her scarred brow. “I may not yet read the language as well as I’d like, but from what I glean from these diagrams she’s planning on altering reality through those runes of yours – the ones that chant such wretched sea-shanties.”

“Yes,” Emily breathed. She stared at the lectern and the skull seemed to burn brighter, teeth spread in a crystalline grin. The closer she drew the more brilliant it blazed until it dazzled. “With something like this, she could change the world entire – or we could. Delilah wants the throne? I could let her have it, and her own perfect world, too.”

Evie said nothing. Candle smoke drifted across her throat and cheeks, obscuring her expression. When at last she spoke, her voice lacked inflection. “If that is what you want.”

The Templar skull pulsed with mystic fire in time with the beating of Emily’s own heart. She was trapped between two wants – the thirst for vengeance and for Evie at her side. Wrath sang in the hinges of her jaw and in all the carnal chambers of her heart; she tried to be selfless in her own way, to be what her mother wanted, what the Outsider taunted her for lacking. “I won’t do it.” Emily finally said, “I won’t trap you here, condemned to a life you never asked for.”

A candle spluttered on an excess of melted wax and Evie trapped Emily in a gaze with the viscosity of amber. “It may not be a life I asked for, but you’re wrong to think a life with you is a life I don’t want.”

To that Emily could muster no reply.

 

* * *

 

“Why do you hide, little niece? I know who you are – what you are! I know what it is you want!”

Within the enchanted painting itself, Delilah’s dream world revolved around a splintered plain of cartilage white and stark inky black. A frozen crowd of adorers and sycophants, nobles and commoners alike paid homage to Delilah upon the throne, all of them petrified mid-laud, mid-extol, their faces frozen in glorious applause. Through their ranks Emily crouched and crept. She could see Evie perched atop the tallest slab of shattered rock, surveying the battlefield, while high atop a pillar Delilah vented her rage, her futile wrath, a child’s fists beating against shut doors and cage bars.

“This!” Delilah spread her arms wide, gesturing to the scene of her creation, paint dripping from the bristles of her brush, viscid as blood from an old wound. “This is all I ever wanted!”

Climbing up the pillar, sneaking up behind her, dragging her body from thrashing consciousness – to Emily it burned less like a victory and more like a mercy.

 

* * *

 

When Emily placed the rune crafted from the Templar skull into the coronal thorns that crowned her throne, it sealed itself in place with a discordant hum like that of steel raking across glass. Evie flinched from the noise, and Emily grit her teeth against it. Delilah’s body came next, slouched in the royal seat of steel and leather, still unconscious from when Emily had throttled her near blind. The pulse pounding beneath Emily’s hands, the tightening of her fingers, the heat warming her up to the elbow at the promise of revenge so close, so desired – she could still do it. She could run Delilah through and through, string loops of leather through her notched heels, disfigure her beyond description, drag her body ‘round the city walls and hang her from the gallows for all to witness the fate of false empresses; the witch could not escape her pathetic heart now.

The blade unfolded in Emily’s hands with a hiss. She held her arm out, hand trembling, knuckles white, pointing the tip of her sword directly over Delilah’s chest where the heart now resided. Behind her, Evie took an abortive step forward, but Emily kept her gaze resolutely fixed on Delilah. A single push of her hand and the blade would slip into Delilah’s chest, staining the throne red on black on silver.

“I’ll find a way to get you back where you belong. I promise,” Emily spoke to Evie without looking at her – unable to look at her – conviction in the hard slant of her spine, crumbling, great hulking cracks shearing off her resolve. The tip of her blade wavered over Delilah’s chest, brushing against the roses the burst from her collar with every breath. “The heart –” Emily choked. Her arm and her voice quivered. “It was all I have left of her. And now it’s gone.”

The same way Evie would be gone before long, slipping through Emily’s fingers into the vast unknown. The same way both she and Delilah had watched childhood molder and decay in this putrid empire, beset by ill-fate at every turn. Now she had been reduced to this – this monstrous pitiful wretch.

Evie let her hand hover over Emily’s back in a moment of indecision, her expression stricken, before pushing Emily’s sword arm down. “You’ll always have mine.”

Emily laughed, a hollow sound, but allowed herself to be led away from the throne where Delilah drooped and the Templar skull smouldered. Evie urged the sword from Emily’s hand with a kind touch and a hushed, “It’s done. Let her pass into her dream world, and let us wake up your father.”

 

* * *

* * *

  **V. RESOLUTION**

They called her Emily the Vengeful. Parents whispered to naughty children that if they were bad then the Empress would steal them away in the night and eat them among the restless chimney stacks. Cowed by the failed coup, the gentry dared do little more than grumble at every new law expedited through their systems: culling the self-governance of vassals, strengthening the throne, collecting aggressive land taxes on previously unlevied properties belonging to the nobility, demilitarising the Grand Guard, instituting an elite force hand-picked from Morey dedicated to the Empress and Empress alone.

Corvo she put in charge of this Imperial Guard, and her father took to his expanded role with a ruthless and dedicated efficiency. From the side-lines he watched Emily move swiftly through the ranks of the aristocracy, purging dissidents and occult supporters of Delilah. Always supportive, but always wary, Corvo lurked behind the throne like a constant shadow, proud, protective, but ultimately silent. Evie he only welcomed with a dubious squint and perfunctory gratitude for _‘services rendered to the crown.’_

Neither Evie nor Emily expanded upon that, exchanging meaningful looks and coughing behind their hands.

A rare slope of sunlight gilded the high windows of Emily’s offices atop Dunwall Tower. Camed shadows slanted across the latest missive over which she poured, scratching a pen against parchment. Her hand moved slowly, precisely. She paused to frown at the globe along the far wall, searching for the right turn of phrase before dipping her nib into an inkwell and tapping it against the glass. Her tell-tale coat hung from the back of her chair and she had rolled her sleeves up to the elbow. Fingers smudged with ink, Emily scratched at her nose, leaving a black mark there as she continued to write.

Seated at one of the plush smoking chairs nearby, Evie peeked up over her book – she had moved on from children’s fables to subjects of firmer stuff in the pursuit of this new writing system – and snorted with laughter.

Emily did not stop writing as she murmured, “What is it?”

With a shake of her head, Evie returned to her book. “Nothing.”

“If you’re bored, you might take a ship and explore the rest of the Isles,” Emily offered not for the first time that month. She fixed her attention on the letter and smoothed any furrows from her brow. “All expenses paid, I should add.”

Evie licked her finger and turned a page, aloof. “I’d sooner explore your bedroom again, if you’re nearly finished.”

The pen’s nib pressed too firmly against the page, blotting the sentence with a punctuation of bold ink. Clearing her throat, Emily set her pen aside mid-sentence and picked up a sullied cloth with which to dab at the letter. Ever since retaking the throne, Evie had taken up residence in quarters midway down the Tower; the only time they could steal away in private was in the safe room. Glancing up, Emily caught sight of Evie watching her over the top of her book with the intensity of an oil-spill fire. “I’m sure something can be arranged.”

Evie’s heated look faded somewhat, replaced by an expression that Emily once thought of as fathomless and which she only recently learned was in fact kin to consternation – fear and worry and doubt all wrapped up and warring together in the draw of Evie’s eyebrows. “Unless you want me to go, of course,” Evie said slowly.

Emily blinked and gave a short shake of her head. “Why on earth would I want that?”

With a shrug, Evie thumbed at the spine of her book. “You’ve been awfully keen for me to leave Dunwall these last few weeks. A lady can get the wrong message, you know.”

Chewing at her bottom lip, Emily admitted, “I’ve tried beseeching the Outsider on your behalf, but he’s not easy to contact these days.” Where once the whale god flitted in and out of Emily’s life with careless abandon, now he maintained an air of stony silence as if suddenly bored by current events and watching, waiting for a more interesting situation in which to intervene. Emily twisted the ink-stained kerchief between her fingers. “The truth is: I feel guilty because I’m glad he can’t ferry you away to your own world. I’d be adrift without you.”

Evie stared at her. Then with a sigh, she buried her face in the book, groaning into its pages. “I’d forgotten how thick young people can be about these things.”

“What -?”

Slapping the book down on her knees, Evie sat up very straight and prim in her pinstripe-red armchair. She fixed Emily in place with a firm glare and announced, “I love you, you absolute foozler. Nothing short of your own orders could tear me from your side. I am yours for the rest of my days – however long that gives us.”

Emily’s mouth opened then immediately shut. Speech evaded her. Perhaps this was one of the timelines that branched from their meddling at Stilton Manor – a kinder world, a world she did not deserve. She grabbed at the cloth only to find air. Glancing down, Emily had to bend to reach the cloth where it had fluttered to the floor in her shock. She snatched it up and promptly began wringing it between her hands again, fierce enough that the rag began to smear her palm grey and black with old ink. When she finally mustered up the courage to speak, she croaked a single syllable, “Oh.”

Evie raised an eyebrow at her. “ _Oh?_ Normally when I profess my undying love for someone, they respond with a smidge more enthusiasm, Miss Kaldwin.”

“I –”  Emily set the rag aside. Her hands were marked and smeared and still Evie sat there, looking at her with exasperated affection. She cleared her throat and forced her hands to be still atop the table, atop the ruined letter. “I’d thought that after all this, after seeing me -- really seeing me – you wouldn’t want to stay.”

Evie’s exasperation gave way to softness. “After seeing you, how could I want to be anywhere else?”

Clearing her throat free of a burr that prickled to the surface of her mouth, Emily pulled a new page to herself, picking up her pen to begin writing the letter anew. “If you’re staying, I suppose I should think of an office to grant you. Purely titular,” Emily added quickly when Evie’s expression bloomed with panic. “The Empress can’t be known to cavort with the middling sort. The political scene is too delicate for all that.”

“I may technically hold a title in my own right, but I must confess I’ve never been suited to a life of civil service.”

Over the top of her desk Emily grinned at her. “That makes two of us.”

A brief knock at the door made Evie freeze in her seat like a mouse caught in a raptor stare. She jerked her book back up right as Corvo entered the room. He stood in the doorway, hawkish, hands clasped behind his back, glancing briefly at Evie before turning to his daughter. “Emily, the Imperial Guard is ready for official inspection.”

Keeping her hand and voice steady, Emily moved the pen with a careful flourish. “Thank you, father. I’ll be sure to come down shortly.”

“Of course.” He turned his attention to Evie and greeted her with a nod. “Dame Frye.”

“Lord Protector,” she replied, voice as crisp and professional as his.

“I’m aware your studies are still progressing, but they might go quicker if you turn the book right side up.”

Cheeks burning, Evie turned the book around and sank further into her seat. The corner of Corvo’s mouth twitched, though he left without another word.

“We need to tell him,” Evie mumbled, casting furtive glances to the door Corvo had just exited through, as though afraid he would return any moment. “About _us.”_

Setting down her pen once more, Emily pushed her chair back and crossed the room to kneel in front of Evie. “Don’t worry.” She cupped Evie’s cheek with her palm, her skin warm even through the cloth wrapped around her hand, hiding her mark from the world. “I’ll handle it.”

 

* * *

 

Most nights Emily took dinner alone in her office, not bothering to push aside her many letters and books of law, of governance and of natural philosophy, platter occupying a precarious perch beside her inkwell. She would scatter crumbs across her work and press them into her mouth with the pad of a wetted finger. Tonight however, she requested a meal in the dining hall proper. The cooks gaped at her over pots of bubbling stew and loaves of bread cooling upon wire racks when the Empress entered the kitchens with ink-spots on her sleeves and the bridge of her nose.

Seated at the head of the narrow lacquered table stacked with silver, Emily tore off hunks of warm bread while to her left her father did the same, their motions nearly identical. When Evie entered the dining hall, she paused in the doorway. Shaking her head with a snort, Evie crossed over to sit at Emily’s right. She picked up a napkin and rather than place it across her lap, she waved it in front of Emily, pointing to her nose. “Have you not looked in a mirror this afternoon?”

Servers placed dishes and poured wine in front of them, and Emily snatched the napkin from Evie with a grumble. “Thank you, Evie.”

Evie shot her a small smile around the arm of a liveried server. “My pleasure.”

Emily swiped her nose clean. A soup of rich tomato-red was set before them. Tossing the napkin back at Evie, Emily dipped a spoon into the soup, thick and hot on the tongue as fresh-spilt oxblood. She watched as Evie did the same – the dart of the tip of her tongue licking up a bright droplet. Emily tore her gaze away before Corvo could notice her staring.

“Father,” Emily began, setting down her cutlery and patting at her mouth with a serviette. “Evie has agreed to stay with us.”

Evie froze, cheek bulging around her spoon before she cleared her throat and swallowed, burying her nose in her wine in a poor attempt to hide herself. Corvo reached for his own glass with a murmur. “From what Emily and Meagan have told me, Evie, you’ve been very helpful. We could use all the help we can get to put Dunwall and the Empire back on the right track. You’re welcome to stay in whatever capacity that may imply.” He swirled the wine in its glass and took a sip.

“Yes. About that.” Emily draped her napkin over her lap, then folded her hands above it. “Having two Royal Protectors seems redundant. So, I was thinking she could be given the title of Royal Consort.”

Both Evie and Corvo choked. One hand splayed out over her chest, Evie hissed around the lip of her glass. “ _This_ is your idea of handling things?”

Corvo glared murder and Emily smiled at her. “Welcome to the family.”

 

* * *

* * *

 

**EPILOGUE**

Jack’s voice grew fainter the longer Evie stayed here. He used to whisper obscenities in her ear, twisting her gut with vitriol and vile triumph every time she landed a killing blow. Now the distance between them stretched so vast nothing could reach her. Her father used to say that Henry had something she lacked, that her kind – the hollow kind – were so rare to stumble across in life. They should live in hovels, in asylums, in sterile isolation away from civilised society. Hide her face from foe, from friend, from family.

Evie studied the crystal skull locked away in Dunwall Tower, glowing faintly beneath the painting where Delilah sat, enthroned in bold glorious colour. The velvet-lined robe throated violet against Evie’s neck, while her hair hung freely about her shoulders. She caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the skull’s polished crown and cinched the belt more tightly around her waist. Had she always looked so grey, so tired? Dark circles hollowed her eyes, made them appear dark and haunting. She’d always believed in ghosts – she had just never expected to see one in a mirror.

“You’re brooding again,” Emily’s voice mumbled into a pillow. “I’ve told you: if you’re going to do that, we must tar and feather you first.”

Mouth thinning to a narrow line, hands on her hips, Evie turned. From her place beneath the covers, Emily watched her with a gaze heavy-lidded and sleep-hazed. Her mussed hair inked across the only pillow that hadn’t fallen to the floor during their lovemaking. Strips of silk spooled across the plush Tyvian carpet and red marks banded Emily’s wrists.

Crossing the space between them, Evie ran an admonishing finger along the underside of Emily’s exposed foot, biting back a grin when Emily jerked her leg away with a squeak. “I’ve seen someone being tarred and feathered; it isn’t very pleasant.”

“Neither is a brooding Consort.” Emily aimed a mock glare over her shoulder as she curled her legs up and away from Evie’s reach. The sheets slipped, wine-dark, down her naked back, there the flesh a terrain of old white scars. Dropping onto the mattress, Evie knelt over Emily, knees planted on either side of her waist, and kissed the pattern of scar tissue that criss-crossed her shoulders. Emily drew in a deep breath, twitching when Evie scraped her teeth. “I thought I got you well enough for one night.”

Evie nipped at the nape of Emily’s neck. “And I thought you young people were supposed to be insatiable.”

“That would imply you’re not enough.”

With a huff of laughter, Evie hummed a soft note into the divot of Emily’s spine, tracing the column down and pushing the sheets aside to press kisses at the dimples above her hips. Emily’s hands pulled her up, tucking her head beneath Evie’s chin. Emily sighed, a wordless content sound into the crook of Evie’s neck, mumbling, “I’m glad you stayed.”

Evie wrapped her arm around Emily’s shoulders, pressed her nose to her scarred temple and breathed into her loose-spun hair. She smelled of sweat and hard iron, of Riviera fig wine and faint cigar smoke, of the whale-blooded streets and sea-salted air of Dunwall. Wild yet industrial. She smelled like home. “As am I.”

 


End file.
